Elections typically require the personal attendance of each voter at one of a limited number of polling places. Improving communications infrastructure make is feasible to hold elections in a distributed fashion. In a distributed election, there are many polling locations, potentially one for each voter. Voters communicate their votes via existing communications networks. Distributed elections could save voters time, as well as save the holders of an election money by requiring fewer dedicated polling resources. The current telephone system is one example of an existing communications system that could be utilized in a distributed voting scheme.
In a distributed voting system each voter must first establish a connection to a vote gathering facility. The voter can then transmit the vote to the vote gathering facility, which tabulates the results. While the basic approach is very simple, there are many opportunities for fraud by outsiders and for undetected communications problems to compromise the integrity of the election results.
A simple first step to reduce the potential of fraud is to issue each voter a unique identifier. The system can then check to make sure that no one casts more than one vote. This does not preclude the interception and alteration of genuine votes, however. It also cannot detect counterfeiters mimicking actual voters who do not cast ballots. There is also no way to distinguish between the real and the counterfeit in the case of duplicate votes being received.
An additional problem is posed by the communications network. Since it is not guaranteed that all voters will cast ballots, some assigned identifiers will not result in ballots communicated to the vote gathering facility. Unfortunately, this situation is indistinguishable from ballots lost due to communications network breakdowns.
Given the rapidly improving state of distributed communications, the continuing need for elections, and the apparent difficulties with simple distributed voting systems, there is an unmet need for improvements that can detect compromises and faults. The current prevalence of telephone communications make it especially desirable that such improvements be suitable for implementation with existing telephone communications networks.